Different Perspectives, Same Goal: Understanding the Importance of Different Points of View.

“If anyone can show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective- I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.” — Marcus Aurelius

We often forget the basics in pursuit something great.

Everything is sequenced and experienced through our previous understandings of experience. If a group of 10 people observed a football match, do we think everyone would survey the game exactly the same at full time? Of course not.

The human experience is a shared but completely unique experience depending on your upbringing, morals, ethics, culture and society that surrounds you. It is something original to the observer, although the same image or circumstance may be shared through unlimited reference points (humans) throughout time; the human experience is an idiosyncratic, personal happening that can only be explained personally to them.

Everything is how you interoperate it; It is easy to wipe away troublesome impressions and immediately be in tranquillity if you understand it’s your perception which drives the mood or emotions around a certain experience.

Remember you can take a third person perspective on any situation and assess how you are reacting yourself.

The only thing you have control over is your reaction to circumstances in front of you.

Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people uses the example of getting lost in a new city. A person with a negative mindset, will see it as a frustrating waste of time. Someone with a positive mindset will see it as an exciting adventure. This is a great example of how a different view or perspective on something can influence or drive an outlook on a circumstance or situation.

You are in control of it all ...

Becoming the watcher of your thoughts and judging your natural instinctive reaction is how you take a different perspective on things. Alan Watts does an excellent job explaining this through metaphor.

“Imagine you are making vegetable soup, all your thoughts, feelings and emotions are the solid vegetables in the pan of soup. When something goes wrong, or a worldly circumstance arises in front of you, in life, it's like you have been thrown in the pan of soup and all your emotions and thoughts are spinning you all over in the pan and driving where you go. Do not let emotions and feelings re-actively drive your output in the world, you can acknowledge this from a third-party perspective and decide to let it "annoy" you or not.”

We can observe the thoughts and emotions like the person stirring of the soup, rather than being in the pan being thrown around from pillar to post, do not let your emotions and thoughts drive your reality.

Funny thing is, you can take a third-party perspective of your own third-party perspective and how the original third party reacted to the secondary third party … Things can get very confusing very quickly!

Doing this give you a perpetual perspective of our own perspective — it's infinite.

If you bend your body into a sitting position every day for a long enough period, the curvature of your spine will account for the new spine position and mould itself there.

A doctor can tell from a radiograph (or an autopsy) whether someone sat at a desk for a living or been on their feet a lot. If you shove your feet into tiny, narrow dress shoes each day, your feet begin to take on that form as well.

Our human engines are naturally programmed for transience and change.

The same is true for our mind. If you hold a perpetually negative outlook, soon enough everything you encounter will seem negative. Close it off and you’ll become closed-minded.

Colour it with the wrong perspective and your life will be dyed the same ...

"Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is coloured by such impressions." — Marcus Aurelius

I will leave you with a short story around circumstance and perspective ...

Once upon a time a Chinese farmer had a horse run away. That evening, all of his neighbours came around to commiserate.

“We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.”

The farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said,

“Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses! You must be the luckiest person in the world!”

The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg.

The neighbours then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,You must be the UNLUCKIEST person in the world!”

The farmer responded, “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg.

Again all the neighbours came around and said, “Isn’t that great! You must be the luckiest person in the world!”

Again, he said, “Maybe.....”

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

Often we label our experience as “bad” if we hate it. And “good” if we like it. But the bad cannot exist without the good, and vice versa.

Whatever happens in our life, we’ll never know the consequences (good or bad) it may bring in the future.

Accept every event as it comes, what situation or circumstance could be more perfectly made for YOU, than the one in front of YOU?

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